All too often, HR forgets the importance of onboarding
All too often, HR forgets the importance of onboarding. Having gone through the rigmarole of advertising a role, sourcing potential candidates, interviewing and eventually hiring – employers believe their work to be done.
In reality, onboarding is one of the most important, if not the most important, phases of the employee life cycle. How you welcome your new team member, the first impression you make, sets the tone for the whole employee experience.
HRD spoke with the author of DocuSign’s newest whitepaper - The five phases of onboarding. He revealed the biggest mistakes HR often makes in the onboarding process and talked us through how to improve the experience using technology.
“Generally, we tend to see two big sets of mistakes when employers are dealing with onboarding,” he explained. “There’s the mistakes that companies were making pre COVID-19, and the mistakes that we’ve seen during.
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“At the beginning of the pandemic, the first major mistake HR started to make was seeing the onboarding phase purely from an administrative point of view and not considering a relationship with the candidates. HR leaders spent a lot of time promoting the employer brand, trying to convince people to apply to the company – but then the effort diminished somewhat. Once the new hire signed the contract with the organization, the relationship with HR became quite loose. No formal onboarding was really put in place – this was especially true for smaller companies.”
As the author told HRD, for larger organizations, their issue became one of compliance and unnecessary admin. Prior to signing the employee contract, everything was digitised – effortless. After the new hire has been claimed by the organization, all too often they come to realise that the next phase is very paper-heavy. There’s no longer any easy online apps to help, it’s a case of siting through mounds of files, reports, and documents.
“This is quite deceptive for candidates,” he continued. “Post pandemic mistakes saw companies trying to mimic their old onboarding practices. They were trying to transition the same processes where they could meet employees face-to-face and turn that into a digital tool.”
Take for example verifying employee documents. In a pre-COVID world, candidates would be asked to submit proof of ID, passports or driving licences. This is decidedly more difficult in remote work.
“It’s difficult and time consuming to be filling out unnecessary forms – with some asking the same questions over and over again,” he added. “It’s frustrating! And it doesn’t give off the best first impression to a new employee.”
These mistakes are as common as they are simple to correct. It’s not a case of upending your entire organizational structure – or even hiring a whole new ‘onboarding team’ – instead, it’s time to place some confidence in tech.
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“HR departments have spent a lot of effort in the past few years investing in employer brand and tools to ease the hiring process,” he continued. “Now is the time to use technology to digitize the onboarding process too. Using electronic signature, for instance, to complete documents inside documents – that’s a super simple first step. Make sure the information you’re asking from employees is properly recorded – so you’re not asking the same questions all the time. Connect all the dots – from insurance cover to holiday allowances - leverage technology to make sure people have a simple and streamlined experience from the off.”
To read more about how you can use technology to improve your employee onboarding experience, download DocuSign’s free whitepaper here.